Wednesday, August 8, 2012

India at Olympics 2012- Day 11

           Day 11 was a quiet affair for India. There were only 3 event scheduled for Indian players.And what should we say, India's representation tried their best to reach the bottom of disappointments at their best.
           Least of all the disappointment, was the performance of Vikas Gowda who participated in the finals of Discus throw.
Vikas could not repeat the performance he gave in qualifying. This time he could not cross the mark of 65 meters and fell miserably behind at 8th position.
In his case at least it was convincing that he managed to qualify for the final round.
             Our next bottom of disappointment was achieved when Renjith Maheshwary failed to give even single correct jump in triple jump event.
Among 27 contestants, he was the only one who could not jump correctly even once. It was disappointing. I was wondering what was running in his mind when he took those three jumps. It is so difficult to follow the basic rules of jumping when you are working hard on them for whole of your career. You can make mistake once or even twice but all your three attempts go wrong is something worth worrying. Either you are totally wrong in your technique or you are not paying attention to what mistakes you are making and trying to rectify it.
            I would not mind if he does not qualify or even he stands last in the whole bunch but at least take a correct jump if not good one.
            I understand that he is a medal winner in some big competitions like Common wealth and Asian games but I also came to know that this is not the first time he failed to get even one jump right.
           One way to look at it is he might be trying too hard to cross that mark of qualifying 17 meters mark and in doing so, he forgot to keep track if he is jumping correct or not.
           Since I did not saw any of his jumps, just followed his attempts, I can not say what exactly went wrong. All I can say is if he is representing India again, he better learn some lessons from past failures.
           The third and the most disappointing performance  of course came from the Hockey team. Seriously!! All five matches lost with big difference when we were expecting a medal from this team!
            I find it hard to believe that a team which was supposed to be one of the best representation of India in Olympics in Hockey till date could not win even a single match.
There is something terribly wrong at the player level or player-coach level which we could not see but that has shaken the whole team up to the root and disturbed their game.
            Hockey team is going to receive lot of criticism once back in India.Many of the senior players might have to say 'Good bye' to their Hockey career. Coach might be changed or he might resign after such a dismal performance. But somebody need to analyze the whole situation and dig out the real reason and real culprit behind this failure.
           One thing is sure. People will surely loose all their leftover interest in Hockey. Indians do not follow Hockey on day to day basis, but they all know Indian Hockey and Olympics  has a golden relation and they want to see it happening again. In the near future, it appears to be more or less a dream only.

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